Jonathan Anderson’s spring 2021 men’s and resort 2021 women’s collections will go down in memory as the show in a box. As a moment in the Lockdown Collections of 2020, this was the sweetest and most original intervention so far, a blend of digital and tactile, craft-y and clever, in a package that came to the doors of critics, and had us unwrapping it like children. Mmm...what is this?
Inside a fabric wrapping were cards printed with the photos you see here, and a little sheaf of fabric swatches to feel. Scatterings of pressed flowers dropped out between pages. There were paper masks printed with boys’ faces—the ones Anderson propped up on the mannequins in his photos. Tiny orange cards with mottoes on them slipped out: “Never compromise,” read one. “Keep looking up,” on another. And, “The future is unwritten.” Inside another little box was a set of insanely delicious brownies, topped with an edible layer of real pansies and marigolds.
Contrast how this launch of Anderson’s collection would have gone under pre-pandemic circumstances. He’d be in Paris for his men’s show, and everyone would be going through the ghastly backstage ritual that’s developed—jostling with each other in an unseemly and impatient manner, shoving smartphones in designers’ faces, shouting questions, and breathing over one another. In spite of the cataclysm that brought it about, how much more human, civilized, and thought-provoking was the sight of Anderson unpacking the box and calmly, unhurriedly explaining its contents on a video for the world to see?
“I’m surprised we even had a collection!” he said, in a one-to-one Zoom call from his studio. “It was like going back to university days, when you can’t get a model, and you have to do everything yourself, at home with a mannequin in your bedroom. And I really enjoyed it. It felt like a collection made in real time. I realized through it that I’ve never wanted to make things more, to be more creative.”
The ability to tune in to the emotion of the zeitgeist is Anderson’s incredibly accurate superpower. A long time ago, he intuited that people would be starting to relate to handmade things—and exactly how spot-on that’s proved to be. His own patchwork, knitted cardigan, as once worn by Harry Styles, has become a peak-craft-wave TikTok phenomenon across continents. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Fans, everywhere, making their own versions! It’s a hand-knit that’s no longer sold, but we’ve just given the pattern away for free,” says Anderson.
If ever there was an endorsement of the joy fashion can bring in dark times, that surely was it. “Early on,” he remembers, “I went through those defeatist weeks, when you question what you’re doing with fashion, what’s its purpose? I think everyone who’s involved in fashion has felt that. But I do believe fashion is always an important mirror of the times. It reflects the trials and tribulations of the age. So with this box that we’ve sent out, I imagined it being put on a bookshelf, and someone else picking it up years later, and these things dropping out: this record of where we were, right now.”
What historians will be studying hence in these two collections is the resurgence of playful resilience in difficult circumstances, the making the best of what already exists. Lots of patchwork coats, gigantic pockets, pom-pom trims; capes made from chopped-up trench coats and military parkas; brocades and faded wallpaper prints. In the resort collection, lovely bias-cut 1930s dresses (a carryover from his thoughts about glamour from the seasons before), with trailing trumpet sleeves and “wings.”
A line in his press notes described the poignant feeling of optimism against the odds that he wanted to put across: “A sentiment of youthful, freewheeling amusement composedly comes to the fore.” The uplifting little messages he sent out on those cards came, he said, from all the comforting things he remembers people close to him saying on calls over the past few months: “You know, talking to my parents, people saying, ‘It’ll get better soon.’” One of them read, “The end is the beginning.”
Will there ever be shows again, as they were? Maybe not. But in this limbo time, how much better does fashion feel when it’s not rushed, pressured, and hysterical? And how grateful are we to designers like Jonathan Anderson who are thinking up new ways to spark pleasure in thinking about clothes? Today, very.
